کتاب 09-21

21

Allie was the one who figured out how to make a travois by folding blankets across a segment of fire ladder. They lashed him down to it, running bungee lines across his shins and hip bones. A final cord went around his forehead. Those were the only places they could put the cables without crossing a broken bone.

He was, by then, unconscious but restless, blowing air from his lips and trying to shake his head. He looked very old, Harper thought, his cheeks and temples sunken, his brow creased. He also had a flustered, dim-witted expression that made her heartsick.

Renée disappeared for a while, but when she returned she had a road map of New England, which she had discovered in the glove compartment of Jakob’s Freightliner. Harper sat with it across her knees for a while, then told them it was two hundred miles to Machias.

“If we set a pace of twenty miles a day,” Harper said, “we can be there in a little over a week.”

Harper waited for someone to ask if she was kidding.

Instead, Allie crouched, took the ends of the homemade travois, and stood. John’s head rose into the air until it was about level with the small of her back. Allie’s face was a grim, stoic mask.

“Better get going, then,” Allie said. “If we start right now we can make ten miles before we lose the light. I don’t see any good reason to waste the day. Do you?”

She glared around at them, as if she expected a challenge. She didn’t get one.

“Ten days on your feet,” Renée mused. She looked at Harper’s distended belly. “When’s the due date?”

Harper showed her a tight smile. “Plenty of time.”

She had lost track, but was pretty sure it was down to less than two weeks.

Renée salvaged a bag of groceries from the wreck and Harper picked the Portable Mother out of the road. They had struggled their way back up the slope to I-95 before Harper noticed Nick was carrying a fire ax. He was a practical child.

Where it wasn’t shattered, the road was blanketed with ash. There was nothing to see, all the way to the horizon, except cinder-colored hills and the charred spears of the pines.

A few hours before dusk they reached a place where the interstate caved away into what had once been a creek. The water was choked with ash, had become a magnesium-colored sludge. A ’79 Mercury floated down it, up to its headlights, looking like a giant robot crocodile patrolling a toxic canal.

Allie set the travois down by the side of the road. “I’ll go upstream, see if there’s another way across.”

“I don’t like the idea of you taking off alone,” Harper said. “We don’t know who might be out there. I can’t lose one more person I love, Allie.”

It blindsided Allie, hearing Harper tell her she loved her. She looked around at Harper with an expression of shock and pleasure and embarrassment that made her seem much younger than she was: twelve, not seventeen.

“I’m coming back,” Allie said. “Promise. Besides.” She tugged the fire ax out of Nick’s hands. “My mom isn’t the only one who knows how to sling one of these around.”

She went down the steep slope at the side of the road, sweeping the blade back and forth to clear her way through the shoulder-high grass.

She was back just as it turned twilight, the sky curdling a sickly shade of yellow. When Harper asked if she had found anything, she only wearily wagged her head and didn’t speak.

They camped on the banks of the river, under the overhang of the collapsed bridge. In the night, the Fireman began to rave.

“Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim chim che-ride, find me some water, ’fore I burn up inside! Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim chim cha-red! If I was on fire, would you piss on my head?”

“Shh,” Harper told him, one hand across his waist, clasping herself to him to keep him warm. The day had been sullen and hot, but after dark the air was so cold and sharp they might’ve been on an exposed mountain ridge. His face was drenched with an icy, sick sweat, yet he kept grabbing the collar of his shirt and pulling at it, as if he were roasting. “Shh. Try and sleep.”

His eyelids fluttered and he gave her a wild, distracted look. “Is Jakob still after us?”

“No. He’s all gone.”

“I thought I heard his truck. I thought I heard him coming.”

“No, my love.”

He patted her hand and nodded, relieved, and slept again for a while.